Social Mobility

All this is known to (most of) this group. Why Does Everyone Lie About Social Mobility? (HT: Rob Henderson, again. I've still got a free one-month subscription if anyone is interested.  You can read a lot of archives in a month if you set your mind to it.) The reason I post it is 1) it is from a country other than America, 2) it highlights that it is not just a few eggheads - remember eggheads? - who are refusing to acknowledge reality, but the most powerful political players, and 3) it uses the phrase cognitive ability, which I think is not only more accurate than intelligence, or IQ, but less toxic in introducing the topic. I think IQ is a pretty good measure of group intelligence and almost as good for individual intelligence, and I think intelligence is a rough approximation of cognitive ability, but they are not all identical.  The brain does many things, after all.

Educationalists began to suspect that the problem was rooted in the very early years of children’s development, before they ever started school.  The Major and Blair governments responded with free child care and nursery school places for the under-fives, with a national network of Sure Start centres aimed mainly at poorer children.  Yet the government’s Social Mobility Commission found none of this had achieved much impact on the performance of the poorest children.

Yes, they found that things were not equal at 30, so the problem must begin at 20. Then they discovered that things were already unequal then and went back to 15, to 10, and to the beginning of school at 5. Upon discovering that they still hadn't found the root, they began to scour the territory for what must be happening in the neighborhoods, and then the kitchens, and then the nursery. Still there is inequality, with the same associations of poverty, and lack of parental involvement, and lower parental education, but somehow, anything that could be clearly identified as a cause remained elusive. BTW, if you want to make yourself famous and well-liked in psychology forever, find a causal effect other than heritability for outcomes. Getting hit on the head or eating lead will work, but you won't get credit for those, because you can't make political programs and educational systems with lots of jobs and prestige out of those. But if you can find a real something that can be implemented by educationalists, you will dine out forever and be invited to conferences.

What to do, what to do? Dare we look at prenatal influences? they thought. We could at least build programs around that, even if most of our people aren't trained in anything like that. And to be fair, you can get some good outcome stuff out of prenatal interventions. I'm all for it.  Load it up for government programs.  It's like if your kid wants to run track instead of play an expensive sport like hockey or lacrosse or golf. Arthur, you can have top-of-the-line track shoes and training shoes. Money is no object, son. Heh heh heh. I am pro- going crazy on prenatal interventions. Buy up everything in sight.  Give it away to rich moms, poor moms, irresponsible moms, pregnant trans men, everyone. That is, if we are now admitting that the other interventions from 0-22 are mostly crap and backing them down.

I will allow that severe nutritional deprivation - and I don't mean "food deserts" where the (usually ethnic) poor shop at Wal-Mart for starches and sugary things instead of at farmer's markets - and sometimes childhood trauma can affect outcomes, but even those don't provide the nurturist bang they were hoping for.  Because humans have endured periods of severe hunger intermittently in childhood up until very recently, even in the west, and even trauma seems to have its primary effects as it is happening, and decades later they are nonetheless getting PhDs and/or cuddling their grandchildren. The pain is real, but life is suffering, as the Buddha supposedly said. The theory that we are just genetic material that happened to survive and in some places prosper, wandering around believing that our conversations and exchange of information has any meaning may in fact be true.  About the rest of you, anyway.

But even that won't happen, because it gets too close to an uncomfortable answer. Dare we push our theory of causes back to...conception? They won't. 

As for the politicians, they are not even remotely thinking about what will work for poor people, whatever they say.  They are thinking about what statements will work for them. It is entirely instrumental, and does not pass through the abstract reasoning parts of the brain at all. They are amoeba searching for food and asexually reproducing entirely by instinct.